you don't see a whole lot of healthy people screaming about their exposure to those deadly glowing, poisonous cancer patients.
Carboplatin isn't infectious.
Now, you and I understand that the HIV used for this therapy would be highly modified from the original plague, but I suspect that the majority of people wouldn't know (or care) about the differences. On the other hand, it's pretty well understood that most poisons are completely localized to the people who ingest them.
4. Environmental policy? We should take care of it for us and for our kids. EXTREME!
And yet, I have no doubt that you want to scream every time you hear a Republican propose a new law to "protect the children." Well, guess what: that works both ways. Do not use "for our kids" as a justification for increased regulation. It doesn't solidify support from those who agree with you, and it disgusts people who don't.
5. Tax Reform? People should pay according to their means more or less. EXTREME!
"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!"
- Karl Marx
Whether you intend it or not, whenever liberals mention progressive taxes, conservatives hear Marx. Seriously. If you ever want to win over a single conservative, then drop this meme like a hot potato. It's one of the biggest turnoffs possible to the average Republican voter.
I like to torture puppies. I don't torture puppies because I like to use power tools (I do lke to user power tools but that's not enough). I torture puppies because I love to inflict anguish.
Trolling isn't power. It's the sign of a kid holed up in a basement since he's gotten his butt kicked ten too many times for being unable to keep his sociopathic mouth shut. You think it's cute. Everyone else on the planet thinks it's a maladjusted waste of time. That you find it to be high entertainment says much more about you than your "audience".
Go read the comments of any outsouring story on Slashdot, and you'll find many racist comments moderated Insightful or Informative.
You'll also see plenty of perfectly reasonable posts moderated Flamebait or Troll:
Poster: I just don't deal with companies that outsource their tech support. If I can't understand the person on the phone, then my money was wasted.
Hyper-PC Mod: Oh, you're a bigot! I must silence you! Flamebait!
Much of racism is subjective. Some people see it everywhere, even when most reasonable people would disagree. For better or worse, "racism!" is becoming the new "wolf!" On the one hand, some legitimate complaints are probably being ignored. On the other hand, one bonehead with an axe to grind is less likely to end someone else's career with a single accusation. The former is bad, but the latter is definitely a Good Thing.
I reviewed a book on Slashdot a while back. I got an email one day from the book's publisher telling me that I'd been selected to receive an advance copy, and it showed up in the mail a couple of days later.
That was the entire history of my contact with the publisher. They didn't offer it as a bribe, or hint that they'd like a good review (or even any review at all). They never contacted me afterward to comment either way.
Honestly, this happens a lot more than you'd expect. It also doesn't necessarily mean that there's any relationship whatsoever between the reviewer and the publisher.
X.org was largely formed because the people who most actively wanted to contribute to XFree86 weren't allowed to. Honestly, I don't think that there's really any left who could or would want to actively continue XFree86. On the other hand, X.org is being sponsored by HP, Sun, and IBM, and has representatives from SUSE, HP, Sun, and Red Hat on its board of directors.
No, the real question is whether anyone qualified to continue X development is still sticking with XFree86. From what I can see, the answer is no.
In my Navy boot camp quarters, my company commander's boss was a raging jerk (at least, toward us), but his boss was a pretty laid-back guy. One day, while guarding the front door, The Jerk yelled and screamed at me to let him in. I passed, but immediately after I was relieved I was ordered to come to the "staff lounge". This is almost verbatim:
The Jerk: [drops a ruler on the ground] Recruit, would you please pick up my ruler?
His Boss: You don't have to do that, recruit.
Jerk: I said, pick up my ruler.
Boss: Don't do it, recruit.
Jerk: IF YOU DON'T PICK UP MY C$#!$C#@! RULER, I'LL $$#@$ KILL YOU!
Boss: I'm giving you a direct order: don't do it.
[repeat for about 2 minutes]
Jerk: [suddenly calm] Recruit, do you like me?
[rest of room: silence and quiet giggles]
Me: SIR! I BOTH FEAR AND RESPECT YOU SIR! Jerk: GET THE $#@() OUT OF HERE!
[rest of room: hysterical laughter]
I have no idea where I came up with that, but I'd swear on a bible that it happened pretty much exactly that way. That night, I learned that I do OK under pressure.
Get a recommendation for a local lawyer and follow through with it. With his consent, call your local newspaper and TV investigative reporters and let them in on it. I can almost guarantee you'll have your entire $1700 (plus probably a little extra "apology money") in record time.
That's the thing about having a lawyer. You don't even have to use them to scare the other guy into honoring their agreement; simply having one is usually enough to make them realize you mean business.
I'm reasonably sure that one of them is Paris Hilton. All things considered, I'd much rather see Ceren or the other girl, or even both at the same time.
Everyone seems to be ignoring the fact that you're required, by law, to spraypaint the logo on the side of every FreeBSD server; to paint the logo on a prominent street-facing wall of your business; to put it on your company letterhead; to tattoo it on the collective bared asses of your admistrative staff. After all, it's very important that all of your customers are aggressively shown the logos of each and every piece of software or office equipment that you use in your daily operations.
Wait, you mean that the only place that Beastie is currently seen in some companies is on a sysadmin's bookshelf, or his screen when visiting FreeBSD.org, and that no one else in the entire company will ever see it (or even know what FreeBSD is or how their company uses it)? Dang! Guess I'll be making an appointment with my proctodermatologist.
Seriously, how is this even an issue? I told my boss that I'd be installing FreeBSD back when I was first hired and started migrating away from Windows servers. I doubt that he even remembers which flavor of Free Unix I went with, and I'm 99% sure he has no idea (or interest) of the fact that their logo has a cartoon daemon. Does this actually matter to anyone?
That's exactly right. My most used variation is "I work on the big ones that run the Internet." It's essentially accurate, and clear enough for my non-technical family and friends to get the gist of it.
In their mind, they paid you to fix the computer and the computer doesn't work.
Screw that. If they pay a mechanic to fix their car and then immediately do the exact same thing that damaged it in the first place, the mechanic would laugh at them for daring to ask for a free re-repair. Frankly, anyone who would act like that wouldn't stay in my circle of "friends I'm willing to support" (or even "friends I consider friends") for very long. I wouldn't ask my doctor friends to repeatedly fix the same self-induced injury for free, so why would anyone rationally expect the reverse to be acceptable?
One upside of working on BSD and Linux all day is that I can look in the eyes of people asking me for free support, tell them I don't know much about Windows, and mention that I'll be happy to help them if they get a Mac. If they follow my advice, then 1) I actually would be able (and willing) to help them, but 2) they rarely need my help anyway.
The above doesn't work as well for people who know how long I worked doing Windows tech support.;-)
Of course, both of their operating systems were hardcoded for one exact model of graphics chip, sound chip, floppy controller, other I/O hardware, and RAM limits. For example, a lot of Amiga software was coded to run directly on the ECS (or later, AGA) hardware and simply could not be made to run on the 3rd-party graphics cards that were increasingly popular in the late '90s.
On the other hand, none of the userspace software on my Linux desktop knows anything at all about the hardware it's running on. Konqueror is perfectly happy to render on the built-in NVidia chipset or a replacement card. Amarok doesn't know or care that it's playing streaming audio to an Intel sound board. Firefox never bothered to ask the brand of my hard drive.
In other words, new systems are abstracted in ways unimaginable (except to computer scientists) in the Amiga and Apple ][ days. This necessarily adds a layer of software between the hardware and the applications you want to run. However, that's a good thing, unless you want to have to get a new version of OpenOffice because you bought a different mouse.
Unfortunately, this required an external keyboard, something others didn't dish out for.
Now that you mention it, what I could really use is an external keyboard without the PDA. Seriously. Give me a small, quiet keyboard with an append-only text buffer that gets wiped clean every time it's synced with its host computer, and maybe a small LCD to show the last 50 or so characters I've typed.
That's it. No editing, so searching, nothing else - just raw text input at high speed. I'm a good enough typist that I could pay attention to a speaker or jot notes without looking at a display, and I have absolutely zero desire for the ability to change fonts and formatting on anything smaller than a PC.
Of course, the odds of anyone actually making this are roughly zero, unless you count using a Bluetooth keyboard with a small Bluetooth computer or PDA hidden away nearby. Too bad. I think I really would have liked my little keyboard.
Just Some Guy, I've been investigating this for over 30 years.
I'm willing to check out your data, but I rather imagine that you don't have any.
My guess is that you thought about it for less than 30 seconds.
Guilty as charged. You made a rather out-of-the-ordinary claim with no mention of supporting evidence, and I summarily filed it under "not very likely".
If I ask my wife if she's angry, then I'm leaking to hear a rather long explanation of why insurance companies suck, and why malpractice insurance sucks, and why trial lawyers suck, and why people who want to raise taxes suck, and why people who use words like "income divide" suck. She's angry because a lot of external forces are conspiring to make our lives more difficult than they need to be.
Yet, somehow, you seem to think that the anger is the problem, rather than the tidal forces ripping at our society. If everyone started taking mood elevators tomorrow, those forces would still be there - we'd just be less responsive to them.
In general, men in the United States lack the social skills necessary to deal with this anger
Were you trying to self-fulfill your prophecy by providing material to legitimately anger them? Seriously, do you have any evidence whatsoever for this ludicrous speculation, or was your plan to just throw that out there as fact and hope we all look the other way? Here, let me try one:
In general, men in Europe lack the social skills necessary to accept their irrelevance in the new world.
I made that up on the spot, just as you did your quote about American men. If my statement isn't flamebait, then how on Earth could you justify yours not being the same?
Thank you for pointing this out. A friend's company sends out weekly newsletters to people who visited his web page and filled out a form to subscribe to it, and it's nothing for him to transmit 25,000 messages in a batch. By most automated metrics, this would look just like a spam transmission or a worm infection, but it's not. Short of some overly complicated rulesets ("customer Foo may occasionally send 40,000 mails, but anything between 2,000 and 5,000 is probably unintentional and should be investigated") I don't see how this could reasonably work.
As it turns out, mysql was still an order of magnitude faster on some tests, while mysql and postgres were close on only a few of the tests.
There's also such a thing as programming idioms. Translating a set of non-ACID MySQL queries verbatim to PostgreSQL isn't likely to give good performance, in much the same way that writing C in Python is going to be dog slow. It doesn't seem to like getting bogged down in the hundreds of tiny individual queries that people used to fire off to MySQL back when they used to think that MyISAM was pretty cool.
On the other hand, idiomatic PostgreSQL is likely to be nearly as fast (or much faster) than its MySQL counterpart, much as idiomatic Python is comparable to C. In both cases, given the backend a high-level task and letting it handle the low-level optimization usually results in a huge performance boost.
In other words, you can't take a series of queries written for 3.x-era MySQL and expect them to run well on pretty much any other database. If that's not what you're doing, then I apologize. If it was, then you might consider re-thinking your testing methodology before drawing conclusions.
Men are often abrasive to each other without any malice and are pretty used to bluntness. However, women tend to be more tactful in person. Neither way is inherently "better" than the other; they're just the recognized and documented differences in the way the genders interact.
So how does this affect women in the technical workplace? A lot of your "alpha geeks" are snotty, condescending jerks. Men brush it off as a personality annoyance and accept it as part of the cost of interacting with those people. Some women would perceive the same behavior as a stream constant personal attacks.
Put another way, through an average guy into a situation with a bunch of arrogant geeks and he'll likely respond in kind without ever thinking a thing of it, while the average woman will wonder why everyone hates her and her work.
That doesn't make it right. That doesn't make it OK. That does, however, make it understandable that a lot of women hate working around technical men.
Anyway, the difference is that under MacOSX and Linux, you must opt to install spyware... it won't be installed by browsing the net.
Much Windows spyware infects its target through security vulnerabilities. Are you saying that OS X and Linux are completely free of all such openings?
The other thing is that if one luser installs spyware, the other users are not adversely affected.
Which other users? The ones on the same machine that suffer from reduced CPU and memory availability? Or the ones on other machines that suffer from reduced network bandwidth?
If you think spyware can't happen here, you're painfully naive. It can (and probably will), and I'm afraid that a lot of people are going to have to eat their words.
I live in the US and I love it but DUDE you gotta get it in you thick skull that the ocean is not the end of the world.
Slashdot is a US-centric website. I'm happy for your aggressive globalization, but don't apply it where it doesn't belong.
you are also paying about $20 a month for a local phone plus whatever you end up paying for your long distance.
How much are you paying for the bandwidth your "cheap" LD service runs through? If you're in college, then that's part of your tuition. If you're not, then you're paying for the POTS/cable/DSL/wireless to route your packets.
Normally, there's little I hate more than running closed-source software as root, but I'll forgive them this time...
Skype brings Yet Another Voice Chat program to Linux, and people sing their praises. RealPlayer brings the first licensed proprietary video codec player to Linux, and people want them to die.
Interesting.
I'm not implying that you're one of the Real haters, but everyone here seems to be thrilled to be running this new closed app, but it'd require a shotgun to get them to install another one that's at least as unlikely to be loaded with spyware. Why is that?
Ouch! I pay $0.05 per minute for Qwest long distance with a $20.00 monthly cap, meaning that I generally end up paying around $0.03 per minute for full-fledged POTS with guaranteed E911 service.
Five years ago, I would've jumped at $0.02 per minute of service. Today, it's not worth my time.
Slashdot Mirror
So download a ripped copy off Kazaa and hit pause in MPlayer. That way you can have all the time you need to ensure you're complying with the law.
Carboplatin isn't infectious.
Now, you and I understand that the HIV used for this therapy would be highly modified from the original plague, but I suspect that the majority of people wouldn't know (or care) about the differences. On the other hand, it's pretty well understood that most poisons are completely localized to the people who ingest them.
And yet, I have no doubt that you want to scream every time you hear a Republican propose a new law to "protect the children." Well, guess what: that works both ways. Do not use "for our kids" as a justification for increased regulation. It doesn't solidify support from those who agree with you, and it disgusts people who don't.
5. Tax Reform? People should pay according to their means more or less. EXTREME!
Whether you intend it or not, whenever liberals mention progressive taxes, conservatives hear Marx. Seriously. If you ever want to win over a single conservative, then drop this meme like a hot potato. It's one of the biggest turnoffs possible to the average Republican voter.
Trolling isn't power. It's the sign of a kid holed up in a basement since he's gotten his butt kicked ten too many times for being unable to keep his sociopathic mouth shut. You think it's cute. Everyone else on the planet thinks it's a maladjusted waste of time. That you find it to be high entertainment says much more about you than your "audience".
You'll also see plenty of perfectly reasonable posts moderated Flamebait or Troll:
Poster: I just don't deal with companies that outsource their tech support. If I can't understand the person on the phone, then my money was wasted.
Hyper-PC Mod: Oh, you're a bigot! I must silence you! Flamebait!
Much of racism is subjective. Some people see it everywhere, even when most reasonable people would disagree. For better or worse, "racism!" is becoming the new "wolf!" On the one hand, some legitimate complaints are probably being ignored. On the other hand, one bonehead with an axe to grind is less likely to end someone else's career with a single accusation. The former is bad, but the latter is definitely a Good Thing.
That was the entire history of my contact with the publisher. They didn't offer it as a bribe, or hint that they'd like a good review (or even any review at all). They never contacted me afterward to comment either way.
Honestly, this happens a lot more than you'd expect. It also doesn't necessarily mean that there's any relationship whatsoever between the reviewer and the publisher.
No, the real question is whether anyone qualified to continue X development is still sticking with XFree86. From what I can see, the answer is no.
The Jerk: [drops a ruler on the ground] Recruit, would you please pick up my ruler?
His Boss: You don't have to do that, recruit.
Jerk: I said, pick up my ruler.
Boss: Don't do it, recruit.
Jerk: IF YOU DON'T PICK UP MY C$#!$C#@! RULER, I'LL $$#@$ KILL YOU!
Boss: I'm giving you a direct order: don't do it.
[repeat for about 2 minutes]
Jerk: [suddenly calm] Recruit, do you like me?
[rest of room: silence and quiet giggles]
Me: SIR! I BOTH FEAR AND RESPECT YOU SIR!
Jerk: GET THE $#@() OUT OF HERE!
[rest of room: hysterical laughter]
I have no idea where I came up with that, but I'd swear on a bible that it happened pretty much exactly that way. That night, I learned that I do OK under pressure.
That's the thing about having a lawyer. You don't even have to use them to scare the other guy into honoring their agreement; simply having one is usually enough to make them realize you mean business.
I'm reasonably sure that one of them is Paris Hilton. All things considered, I'd much rather see Ceren or the other girl, or even both at the same time.
Wait, you mean that the only place that Beastie is currently seen in some companies is on a sysadmin's bookshelf, or his screen when visiting FreeBSD.org, and that no one else in the entire company will ever see it (or even know what FreeBSD is or how their company uses it)? Dang! Guess I'll be making an appointment with my proctodermatologist.
Seriously, how is this even an issue? I told my boss that I'd be installing FreeBSD back when I was first hired and started migrating away from Windows servers. I doubt that he even remembers which flavor of Free Unix I went with, and I'm 99% sure he has no idea (or interest) of the fact that their logo has a cartoon daemon. Does this actually matter to anyone?
That's exactly right. My most used variation is "I work on the big ones that run the Internet." It's essentially accurate, and clear enough for my non-technical family and friends to get the gist of it.
Screw that. If they pay a mechanic to fix their car and then immediately do the exact same thing that damaged it in the first place, the mechanic would laugh at them for daring to ask for a free re-repair. Frankly, anyone who would act like that wouldn't stay in my circle of "friends I'm willing to support" (or even "friends I consider friends") for very long. I wouldn't ask my doctor friends to repeatedly fix the same self-induced injury for free, so why would anyone rationally expect the reverse to be acceptable?
One upside of working on BSD and Linux all day is that I can look in the eyes of people asking me for free support, tell them I don't know much about Windows, and mention that I'll be happy to help them if they get a Mac. If they follow my advice, then 1) I actually would be able (and willing) to help them, but 2) they rarely need my help anyway.
The above doesn't work as well for people who know how long I worked doing Windows tech support. ;-)
On the other hand, none of the userspace software on my Linux desktop knows anything at all about the hardware it's running on. Konqueror is perfectly happy to render on the built-in NVidia chipset or a replacement card. Amarok doesn't know or care that it's playing streaming audio to an Intel sound board. Firefox never bothered to ask the brand of my hard drive.
In other words, new systems are abstracted in ways unimaginable (except to computer scientists) in the Amiga and Apple ][ days. This necessarily adds a layer of software between the hardware and the applications you want to run. However, that's a good thing, unless you want to have to get a new version of OpenOffice because you bought a different mouse.
As a Mason, let me be clear: the file format may indeed be cryptic, but we had nothing to do with this one.
Besides, we're more interested in handshakes and networking. We let the Teamsters handle the obfuscation and misdirection stuff.
Now that you mention it, what I could really use is an external keyboard without the PDA. Seriously. Give me a small, quiet keyboard with an append-only text buffer that gets wiped clean every time it's synced with its host computer, and maybe a small LCD to show the last 50 or so characters I've typed.
That's it. No editing, so searching, nothing else - just raw text input at high speed. I'm a good enough typist that I could pay attention to a speaker or jot notes without looking at a display, and I have absolutely zero desire for the ability to change fonts and formatting on anything smaller than a PC.
Of course, the odds of anyone actually making this are roughly zero, unless you count using a Bluetooth keyboard with a small Bluetooth computer or PDA hidden away nearby. Too bad. I think I really would have liked my little keyboard.
I'm willing to check out your data, but I rather imagine that you don't have any.
My guess is that you thought about it for less than 30 seconds.
Guilty as charged. You made a rather out-of-the-ordinary claim with no mention of supporting evidence, and I summarily filed it under "not very likely".
If I ask my wife if she's angry, then I'm leaking to hear a rather long explanation of why insurance companies suck, and why malpractice insurance sucks, and why trial lawyers suck, and why people who want to raise taxes suck, and why people who use words like "income divide" suck. She's angry because a lot of external forces are conspiring to make our lives more difficult than they need to be.
Yet, somehow, you seem to think that the anger is the problem, rather than the tidal forces ripping at our society. If everyone started taking mood elevators tomorrow, those forces would still be there - we'd just be less responsive to them.
Were you trying to self-fulfill your prophecy by providing material to legitimately anger them? Seriously, do you have any evidence whatsoever for this ludicrous speculation, or was your plan to just throw that out there as fact and hope we all look the other way? Here, let me try one:
In general, men in Europe lack the social skills necessary to accept their irrelevance in the new world.
I made that up on the spot, just as you did your quote about American men. If my statement isn't flamebait, then how on Earth could you justify yours not being the same?
Thank you for pointing this out. A friend's company sends out weekly newsletters to people who visited his web page and filled out a form to subscribe to it, and it's nothing for him to transmit 25,000 messages in a batch. By most automated metrics, this would look just like a spam transmission or a worm infection, but it's not. Short of some overly complicated rulesets ("customer Foo may occasionally send 40,000 mails, but anything between 2,000 and 5,000 is probably unintentional and should be investigated") I don't see how this could reasonably work.
There's also such a thing as programming idioms. Translating a set of non-ACID MySQL queries verbatim to PostgreSQL isn't likely to give good performance, in much the same way that writing C in Python is going to be dog slow. It doesn't seem to like getting bogged down in the hundreds of tiny individual queries that people used to fire off to MySQL back when they used to think that MyISAM was pretty cool.
On the other hand, idiomatic PostgreSQL is likely to be nearly as fast (or much faster) than its MySQL counterpart, much as idiomatic Python is comparable to C. In both cases, given the backend a high-level task and letting it handle the low-level optimization usually results in a huge performance boost.
In other words, you can't take a series of queries written for 3.x-era MySQL and expect them to run well on pretty much any other database. If that's not what you're doing, then I apologize. If it was, then you might consider re-thinking your testing methodology before drawing conclusions.
So how does this affect women in the technical workplace? A lot of your "alpha geeks" are snotty, condescending jerks. Men brush it off as a personality annoyance and accept it as part of the cost of interacting with those people. Some women would perceive the same behavior as a stream constant personal attacks.
Put another way, through an average guy into a situation with a bunch of arrogant geeks and he'll likely respond in kind without ever thinking a thing of it, while the average woman will wonder why everyone hates her and her work.
That doesn't make it right. That doesn't make it OK. That does, however, make it understandable that a lot of women hate working around technical men.
Much Windows spyware infects its target through security vulnerabilities. Are you saying that OS X and Linux are completely free of all such openings?
The other thing is that if one luser installs spyware, the other users are not adversely affected.
Which other users? The ones on the same machine that suffer from reduced CPU and memory availability? Or the ones on other machines that suffer from reduced network bandwidth?
If you think spyware can't happen here, you're painfully naive. It can (and probably will), and I'm afraid that a lot of people are going to have to eat their words.
Slashdot is a US-centric website. I'm happy for your aggressive globalization, but don't apply it where it doesn't belong.
you are also paying about $20 a month for a local phone plus whatever you end up paying for your long distance.
How much are you paying for the bandwidth your "cheap" LD service runs through? If you're in college, then that's part of your tuition. If you're not, then you're paying for the POTS/cable/DSL/wireless to route your packets.
Skype brings Yet Another Voice Chat program to Linux, and people sing their praises. RealPlayer brings the first licensed proprietary video codec player to Linux, and people want them to die.
Interesting.
I'm not implying that you're one of the Real haters, but everyone here seems to be thrilled to be running this new closed app, but it'd require a shotgun to get them to install another one that's at least as unlikely to be loaded with spyware. Why is that?
Five years ago, I would've jumped at $0.02 per minute of service. Today, it's not worth my time.